When the migrants cross the Mexican border and enter Jim and Sue Chilton’s ranch, they go one of two ways. Those in civilian clothes head west, looking for Border Patrol officers to hand themselves in and request asylum, the couple said. Others, in camo fatigues and carrying large backpacks, go north.
They wear slippers made of carpet over their shoes to make it harder to be tracked. They steer clear of roads, instead choosing grueling treks up and down rocky ravines through mesquite trees and shrubs to get where they are going.
The Chiltons know they have been there because their journeys have been captured on hidden cameras the couple set up during the Obama administration. They say government agents have told them the backpacks often contain illegal drugs like fentanyl or cocaine. But the couple say they’ve been told that most of these smugglers are not caught. They become known as “gotaways” because they were spotted approaching the border and then, literally, got away.
But the Chiltons, and others here in this sparsely populated wilderness west of I-19, believe that is going to change.
Ranchers, Border Patrol officers, vigilantes and even migrants themselves believe that Donald Trump’s second presidency is bringing a crackdown. And most of the people we met in southern Arizona say they’re excited to see it.
Leaving an open door
Trump’s border wall had extended five miles along the edge of the land the Chiltons lease from the federal government when President Joe Biden took his oath of office. Within hours of the inauguration, Jim Chilton said, work on the barrier had stopped completely, leaving a half-mile of open border along the property line. Sue Chilton calls that “the door.”
“That’s what it has become,” she said. “Obviously if you leave your door standing open in your house, where do people come in? The door!”
She said the end of the wall soon became the route for cartels bringing in groups of people. Those in civilian clothes headed for officers, asking for help from the men and women who were tasked to shuttle them to processing centers. Those migrants may have had a myriad number of reasons for wanting to get to the United States. But for the cartels, the Chiltons believe, they were mainly a decoy to take the time and the attention of the agents while the drug carriers in camo and carpet slippers did their best to go undetected.
The couple said Border Patrol agents told them that an average of 100 to 140 people crossed their ranch every day in April this year. Two months later, Biden put caps on the numbers who could claim asylum each day and the numbers fell to about 25 a day, the Chiltons said. But that’s still too many for them and they say the executive action came too late.
“Currently we have tremendous numbers of really bad people coming across my ranch. It’s dangerous, they often have weapons. You really need to secure the border at the border,” said Jim, a fifth-generation rancher who keeps a rifle at his front door and drives with a pistol in his truck for self-defense. He and his wife supply food and water to anyone who asks and recognize the plight of some asylum seekers. But traffickers loaded with drugs crossing their land with near impunity makes them angry.
“The idea that people coming through here, through my ranch, are coming in to poison our people is very, very objectionable to me,” Jim said.
He welcomes Trump’s strong words on closing the border to illegal crossings, including sending active-duty troops.
“You need to prevent the drugs coming through, and if it takes the military to do it, we need to do it.”
The Chiltons’ support for Trump is no surprise — they had a prime speaking spot at the Republican National Convention this summer, between Tom Homan, now named as Trump’s border czar, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
And while they want the border wall finished, they still support legal immigration.
“I believe that immigrants are really an important part of the United States and they have been historically,” said Jim. “Even Elon Musk, he’s an immigrant. We currently admit about a million people a year, legally — why not two million? But everybody coming in this country should come in legally.”
Shutting the door
Hugo is himself an immigrant, but now spends some of his time off in southern Arizona trying to stop more people coming in.
A native Uruguayan and naturalized American living in Greenwich, Connecticut, he did not want to give his last name for fear it would hurt his business. He said it was easier for him, arriving first as an exchange student back in the 1980s and then being sponsored by an employer, but said there were still opportunities to start a life in the US.
“I don’t think anybody’s said we should have zero immigration, that’s what makes the country work and what makes the country great,” he said.
He feels his time with a vigilante group called Arizona Border Recon is his opportunity to give back to the country that welcomed him.
Tim Foley, the leader of the volunteers, said they were waiting to intercept 20 or so gotaways they had spotted heading north into the US. If they meet them, he said, he and his men would tell them to go back, and he expected them to do it.
“When you’re standing there with AR-15s and my guys are pretty much all combat veterans so they know how to handle themselves, they don’t get jumpy, they just stand there and say ‘Vámonos’ and it works,” he said.
Foley thought he would still be needed at the border even if Trump did order the military to intervene.
“The only thing he could deploy is National Guard, and I’ve been here through three National Guard deployments,” he said, adding “Never did” when asked if troops could secure the border.
“It takes a certain mindset” to deal with the weather and the terrain and stay on task, he said.
One Border Patrol agent, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told CNN he and his colleagues were “very happy” for things to change with the new Trump administration.
“Not going to be a federal babysitter anymore,” he wrote in a text message. “Agents want to be in the field doing their job. We have a lot of territory to take back from the cartels and the scouts they employ. It’s going to take a few months to figure out the routes they’re using and scout locations … The checkpoints will be busy until (the cartels) understand that (the checkpoints) will be operating 24/7.”
Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels will be happy for the help. “The border is in the worst shape, the ugliest I’ve ever seen,” said Dannels, who has been in law enforcement for 40 years, the last 12 as the elected sheriff of the border county east of Nogales.
He blames the federal government under Biden for letting it happen, for making his county so dangerous that he must focus his deputies on catching those coming in to pick up the gotaways rather than the usual public safety responsibilities of investigating burglaries, drunk or drugged driving, and domestic violence.
“We’ve had to reprioritize because the biggest risk this county is facing and has faced is this border. When you have — I hate to say it — repetitive criminals that have a lot of criminal histories … coming here to commit crime, their crimes don’t stop at the border, they don’t stop at the county line, they bring stolen vehicles, guns, warrants, you name it.”
Dannels said there are areas where gotaways hide in bushes, waiting for a car to arrive, blow their horn as a signal, and pick them up. As local law enforcement, his deputies can stop suspicious vehicles and question the drivers, though Border Patrol must be called to handle any undocumented migrants.
Deputies often chase cars packed with people who have crossed the border illegally, but Dannels said the taxiing part of the operation is almost always done by Americans. Out of thousands of people booked by his department on border-related crime in the last 35 months, more than 90% were US citizens, he said, including teenagers too young to even get a learner’s permit.
The sheriff said his main hope was that the new Trump administration will at least engage on border policy in a way he thinks the Biden team did not.
“This border is a federal government problem, not a local sheriffs’ (problem.) But once they take two or three steps into my county, it becomes my problem.”
Reaching over and through the wall
A few dozen miles east from the Chilton ranch, where cattle grazed while Foley and his team waited for gotaways, and a few dozen miles west from Sheriff Dannels’ patrols in Cochise County, the border wall stands tall along West International Street on the outskirts of Nogales.
It’s a place where families come to see and talk to each other through the fence, provided no law enforcement action is being taken.
But it’s also still a place where we saw just this week two people brazenly shimmying up the wall from the Mexican side, only stopping and taking off when they saw we were recording.
We saw a similar event on a previous visit, though then the border crossers paid us no heed and continued climbing over the wall and into the US before running off.
If the extra caution is one sign of things changing as Trump prepares to retake office, migrants who have established themselves in the United States are wondering what else the future will bring.
Earlier in the week, a woman sat in a camp chair on the US side of the border, chatting to her parents and sister through the fence. She said she had been able to make a life for herself as an undocumented worker and hoped that would continue despite changes in the White House.
Her mother, on the Mexican side, thought it could be harder to get a visa to visit her daughter. It’s been 13 years since they were able to hug.
A man called Rafael came to the fence to celebrate his 34th birthday with his parents, brother and young son.
He said he spends his days working construction before going straight home to stay out of sight and any potential trouble. “I stay in my house, go to work, and try to do the best and that’s it.”
Rafael said he has a respect for Trump, despite the new threats to his own livelihood. He believed his construction site would probably close if all undocumented workers were deported, as everyone on his crew had arrived illegally.
But all he really wanted to do was celebrate his birthday, as close as he could get to his family. He ate cake on one side of the barrier, his relatives did the same on the other side. And after clearing up the trash, Rafael kissed his son’s finger — the only part of him that could fit through the fence.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified an aid group camp in a photo. It has also been updated to correct the length of Sheriff Dannels’ career to 40 years in law enforcement.
